“... count for him since Guibert feels he alone fully exists on the page. Although his narcissism may give an antic energy to his prose, fortunately it does not hood his observing eye. His characters are very real indeed and his betrayals as succulent as those Genet promises but seldom delivers. Among his photographs are portraits of his friends, many of whom ...”

“... Sun. (At least this was Rowland’s version of what was happening – Murdoch has denied it.) Robert Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell ...”

“... Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future fortunes of us both’. The tourists had planned to stop in Oxford for three or four days but ended up staying three weeks. When they finally set out for Wales, Coleridge’s head ...”

“... difference; but it didn’t happen. Older voters tended to be the most staunchly Unionist: time may not be on the Union’s side. As yet, despite the Westminster party leaders’ widely publicised referendum ‘vow’, it’s not clear what will emerge. We may get a flavour of devo-max, the option Daveheart was determined ...”

“... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...”

“... have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the military operations per se, but excels in her ...”

“... dead lie round’, surely he is suggesting that the wisdom here isn’t just a worldly wisdom, but may contain something more. What is the difference, then, between this ‘someone’ of Larkin’s with ‘a hunger in himself to be more serious’ and the voice at the end of ‘Little Gidding’ who states: ‘We shall not cease from exploration’? Poets have ...”

“... and was framed in response to that immediate context, in particular the posthumous publication of Robert Filmer’s patriarchalist theory of government. Since then, authorial intent and context have been the central preoccupations of the Cambridge School and its leading proponent, Quentin Skinner, whose recent retirement from the Regius chair at Cambridge ...”

“... have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. It’s not ...”

“... initially as sure-footed and commanding as the self-serving and misleading account by his brother Robert suggests. Kennedy’s dramatic televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba was ‘designed to divert attention from his private belief (and that of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara) that the ...”

“... he let me know that he didn’t appreciate my pun. The English, you see, have no sense of humour. Robert Lewis of St James’s Street, ‘the most beautiful cigar shop’, does not for all that escape a little mockery. ‘If the salesman feels you are truly worthy,’ says the magazine You, ‘you might be invited downstairs to the basement.’ ‘They also ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... again, only Herbert comes into precise comparison, Popish prelates and Dissenters not qualifying. Robert Herrick has three mentions, but his poetic genius is too lofty to arouse envy: one can but read with haunted admiration the deceptively innocent lyrical outpourings from his Devonshire vicarage. John Donne, the greatest of the deans of St ...”

“... an Information Review Task Force headed by a senior counterintelligence officer, Brigadier General Robert Carr, which studied the impact of the revelations and sought to produce a list of people who might have been killed because of the information the cables contained. Carr later described the extent of his task force’s failure, in testimony given at ...”

“... reports a fragment of the story of Francis Jansen, a Belgian photographer, friend and protégé of Robert Capa, who works for the Magnum agency, and has disappeared. A young man, our narrator, meets Jansen (‘when I was 19’) and offers to sort and catalogue his work. Jansen is friendly, but aloof, distracted, avoiding all his old friends, not answering the ...”